1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to data processing. More particularly, embodiments are provided for determining a position of a dialog box relative to hyperlinks.
2. Description of the Related Art
Hyperlinks are graphical objects in an electronic document that link the document to another electronic document. Documents containing hyperlinks are typically formatted using a standard markup language, such as the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and are viewed using a computer software application known as a web or hypertext browser. Hyperlinks have become an extremely popular manner for interfacing with a computer due to its intuitiveness, simplicity and efficiency. With hyperlinks, a user is permitted to navigate between documents and/or between different locations in the same document simply by moving a pointer over a hyperlink and selecting the hyperlink by depressing a key or button (a process known as “pointing and clicking”).
In general, hyperlinks may be text (called hypertext links) or images. Hypertext links often include text that is embedded within a text string that is highlighted to identify the text as a hypertext link. As such, a user is often able to navigate by directly selecting the text from a portion of a text string. For example, a text string such as “the winner of the 1973 Kentucky Derby was Secretariat” might have a hypertext link defined for the word “Secretariat”, such that a user might be able to view a separate document with Secretariat's career racing statistics simply by pointing and clicking on the word “Secretariat”.
A principal use of hyperlinks is in retrieving information from the Internet, and specifically, a portion of the Internet known as the World Wide Web (“the Web”). Moreover, due to the ever-increasing popularity of the Web, many private networks, as well as other applications local to a user's workstation, now use hyperlinks to access and navigate between documents.
However, the convenience of hyperlinks is diminished by obstructions which obscure the link from the view of the user. One such obstruction is a dialog box. Dialog boxes are small graphical boxes that are used within a graphical interface of a computer system to display small amounts of information. Typically, a dialog box contains text and one or more buttons such as an “OK” or “CANCEL” button, and may contain one or more text entry fields. One distinguishing property of dialog boxes is that they pop to the foreground of the user interface in an attempt to immediately gain the user's attention. In some cases, a dialog box may be presented as a result of an event experienced by the browser, such as when a hypertext document cannot be refreshed. Dialog boxes may also result from the processes within the Web page itself. For instance, if the Web page uses Java or Java Script code as part of its implementation, then this code may request that a dialog box be rendered to complete processing.
Dialog boxes can be modal or non-modal. A modal dialog box is one that does not allow any other interaction by the user with the application until the dialog box is responded to by the user. A non-modal dialog box allows the user to continue to interact with the application and neglect the dialog box until a later time. Even where non-modal dialog boxes are used, it is often the case that such a dialog box will be rendered in a position that blocks access to the controls on the Web page that the user desires to interact with. In particular, the box may be blocking hypertext links. When this occurs, the user must at least move the dialog box out of the way. This mitigates much of the advantage gained by using a non-modal dialog, and causes the user to prematurely deal with the dialog box.
Therefore, a need exists for a manner of controlling the placement of dialog boxes over content of an electronic document and in particular, a manner of controlling the placement of non-modal dialog boxes such that document content, such as hyperlinks, remains accessible.